HIS name adorns schools, streets, bridges and colossal biographies. Almost as soon as they can talk, American children are taught to revere Martin Luther King. His message was a simple clarification of America’s founding promise, that “all men are created equal” and have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. That means everyone, he explained. He put it best on August 28th 1963, ad-libbing before a crowd in Washington, DC: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

In the 50 years since then, America has changed beyond recognition (see article). Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South risked lynching if they tried to register to vote. They were forced to use separate and inferior water fountains and schools. They were locked in lowly occupations: in 1940, 60% of black women with jobs were domestic servants.

Now, African-Americans are more likely to vote than any other racial group, at least if Barack Obama is on the ballot. White bias against non-white candidates is hard to detect. The governor of lily-white Massachusetts is black; Mr Obama won more of the white vote in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004. In King’s day, inter-racial love was illegal in many states. Today, 15% of new marriages cross racial lines; for black men, the number is 24%. In King’s day, segregation was the law in the South and the norm in the North. Today, “all-white neighbourhoods are effectively extinct”, finds a recent study by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, and segregation is declining in all 85 of America’s largest metropolitan areas. No one today finds it odd to see blacks running big cities (Washington, Philadelphia, Denver) or big companies (Merck, Xerox, American Express) or playing God on the silver screen (Morgan Freeman). Black earnings shot up after the civil-rights revolution, both in absolute terms and relative to white.

Progress, interrupted

Yet in recent years economic progress has stalled. Between 2000 and 2011, black median household income fell from 64% to 58% of the white figure. The wealth gap is even more alarming. Because mortgaged homes make up more of poorer people’s wealth, the gap widened dramatically after the housing bubble burst. In 2005 white families’ median net worth was 11 times that of blacks; in 2009 it was 20 times. On other measures, too, blacks fare poorly. Many struggle in school: the average black 17-year-old reads and manipulates numbers about as well as a white 13-year-old. Many fall foul of the law: by the age of 30-34 one black man in ten is behind bars; the figure for white men is one in 61. And the traditional black family has collapsed since King’s day. In the 1960s many thought it a crisis that nearly 25% of black children were born out of wedlock. Today it is 72% (for whites, 29%), and most of these children are being raised by mothers who are truly alone, not cohabiting.

Explanations of these figures tend to fall into two camps. Some stress the lingering effects of racism. Black schools are underfunded; employers overlook black job applicants; the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks. If this diagnosis is correct, the best prescription may be more funding for inner-city schools, sterner enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and better training for cops and judges.

It seems unlikely, however, that racism has grown worse in the past decade. To express a racist opinion in America today is a career-ending mistake. Firms caught discriminating are punished both by the courts and by consumers. Those failing black schools are not a racist conspiracy: many answer to black mayors, just as federal prosecutors answer to a black attorney-general. Polls suggest that racism is dwindling: the young are far less bigoted than the old. And the obstacles that racism creates are not insuperable. The median earnings for black and white women with college degrees, for example, are about the same.

Conservatives, black and white, tend to argue that although racism still exists, it is largely up to blacks to solve their own problems. Americans who finish high school, work full-time and wait until they are 21 and married before they have children have only a 2% chance of being poor. Depressingly few blacks meet all three fairly basic conditions.

Jim Crow’s shadow

Yet although individuals are ultimately responsible for their own fate, the legacy of discrimination is hard to shake off. Poverty begets poverty, even more now than in the past: as technology advances, those who struggle at school are falling further behind in the workplace. And the economic crisis hit single-parent families hard, since they lack the safety net that a second adult provides.

There are ways in which the government can help blacks, not by tackling racism head-on, but by addressing flaws in the American system that hurt blacks more than whites. The scandal of the justice system is not that it is biased, but that it is brutal. Locking up non-violent drug offenders for decades tears families apart. Far better to give minor criminals of all races drug treatment, ankle tags and help finding jobs.

Likewise, experience shows that inner-city schools cannot be fixed by throwing money at them. Many are run for the benefit of unsackable teachers, rather than pupils. And as Mr Obama has observed, many black students sneer that a classmate who reads is “acting white”—and shun him. This self-destructive cultural norm is almost non-existent in private schools, which is one reason why black parents are so keen on vouchers and charter schools. When reformers call school choice “the new civil-rights struggle”, they have a point.

There is not a great deal that politicians can do about the collapse of the black family, but school and prison reforms should help: black women, unsurprisingly, prefer partners who are neither ill-educated nor incarcerated. Role models help, too: Mr Obama inspires young black men partly because he has a wife and daughters he patently treasures and respects.

America’s shameful past is fading. Skin colour is nothing like the barrier it once was. But the “pursuit of happiness” to which King referred is never easy, and never ends.